


Lost and Found

by nurfherder



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Friendship/Love, Gen, Human Castiel, Laundromat, M/M, Season/Series 09
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-09
Updated: 2013-08-09
Packaged: 2017-12-22 22:59:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/919005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nurfherder/pseuds/nurfherder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of lost things and a lost person, looking for home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost and Found

Every article of clothing Castiel has on was once abandoned at the laundromat. Left in dryers or forgotten on folding tables, Castiel finds them and waits as the hours pass, as dusk starts to creeps in. When the temperature has dropped and he shivers with the night air, he picks up each piece and carefully layers it on, one layer for each day he has been here. It’s almost enough to keep him warm.

He has lost track of how far he has come, how long he has been walking. His loafers--Jimmy’s loafers--have worn down so tremendously Castiel’s feet are blistering. He never had to deal with that kind of feeling before, not even in Purgatory, when he let his clothing and strength tatter. He has wandered town, state, and forest, and along the way, he has found good people. Kind people. People who helped him by giving him a ride, or by giving him a few dollars for coffee. He doesn’t deserve that kind of treatment. After all, if they knew they were helping the man who caused the sky to fall, perhaps they would change their minds.

His bleeding feet are his penance. His shivering hands are his penance. He meets people who are worse off than he, whose souls are pure and untouched by such sin as his own. He gives them what he can. He gives his trench-coat to an old woman, who should be basking in the warmth of her family and retirement instead of huddled on the street. He gives his suit jacket, shirt, and tie to a man who speaks in the soup kitchen of wanting to find a job. Castiel gives when he has nothing to give, and when he takes clothing from the laundromat, he laments that as well. He doesn’t even deserve what people have thrown away. So it’s only a matter of time before he gives that clothing away too. Taking, giving, taking, giving, always making sure he can still feel the cold at night. This is his path, across earthen and manmade boundaries, until he finally ends up where he planned to all along: Lebanon, Kansas.

But Lebanon isn’t safety. It isn’t refuge. Castiel has walked the days and slept the nights, thinking of two brothers and a warm bed. Thinking of how very much he longs to see them--they pointed north for him, his compass in the way they once used to be. So he arrives in their town, but he does not go to find them. He can dream about the Winchesters, and he can dream about Dean, but he does not follow through. He came to Kansas because he simply did not know where else to go. And now that he is here, he is stuck.

He thinks about Dean, and Castiel remembers how everything that has gone wrong is his own fault. Everything. All of it. He questions himself and drowns in regret: why hadn’t he gone to Dean first? Why hadn’t he listened to Dean? Dean always knows what to do; how could Castiel have been so blind? And, the most agonizing question to think about: How on earth can Castiel even dare to dream to go to him now?

Dean had once called him family. Dean, whose face was bloodied and bruised and awful to look at, had stared up at him and begged for own his life by begging for Castiel’s. By begging him to return to normal. Family, he had said. But Castiel did not deserve that. He would never deserve that.

So he haunts the streets. He hugs the alleyway near the laundromat, and he relishes his punishment--at last, the true punishment his actions have earned--be cold, miserable, and alone.

And when the fists hit his face, he deserves those too.

He forgets, at first, that he cannot easily repel his assailant. Another man, older, homeless for much longer than Castiel, his brain addled by voices he cannot control and impulses he cannot fight, has decided that Castiel is in his territory, invading his home. He yells at Castiel, screams at him, and Castiel remembers how just yesterday he had found an old, tattered hat by a washing machine and had given it to this man. His ears had been so cold they were blue.

Castiel holds out his hands--it’s his instinct--he waits to feel God’s heavenly light pour from him and out into the world... and then he remembers that he is nothing. The man attacks his face, his stomach--and Castiel should run but he cannot control his feet, and he deserves it, he deserves to be hurt, he deserves the sting on his lip and the taste of metal on his tongue...

The sound of a car echoing through the alleyway startles the man and scares him off. He shouts another warning to Castiel, shouts about the police being after him, and then he is gone. Castiel lays face down on the ground, blood pooling from his mouth, and he listens to the nearby rumble of the engine. He wishes the man had just killed him, had finally ended this, so Castiel wouldn’t believe the tortuous trick of his ears; the car sounds like the Impala. But that’s not possible.

It takes him a few minutes to recover. More than a few, if he’s honest. He leans his back against the laundromat wall and wipes his busted lip with the back of his hand. His shirt--he looks down and sees it--his shirt is peppered by his own blood. He remembers how close he is to the laundromat, to the very place he once found this shirt, and he almost laughs. But it is not funny at all.

He stands. He is done with Lebanon. He can no longer stay here and torture himself, waiting to find the courage or belief or the reason to carry on. There must be someplace for him in this world. And if there isn’t... well: there is always that option as well.

He moves carefully, hunching his shoulders and gripping the brick, straightening as he makes his way along the wall, fingers scraping against it as he goes. He rounds the corner, palming the glass windows for support, and had he been looking up he wouldn’t have been taken quite so by surprise. He might have noticed the sleek black car parked at the front; he might have noticed Dean Winchester staring at him from inside the laundromat as he opens the door.

The bell tinkles above him. The room glows green with fluorescent light. Castiel looks up, and he and Dean do not blink.

The t-shirt in Dean’s hands, the one he had been so carefully folding, suddenly falls away into the basket. Dean’s jaw is hanging open, and Castiel’s blood is suddenly flying through his ears. He cannot think. He is trying to read the quirk of Dean’s eyebrows, the steel glint in his eyes, trying to understand how angry Dean is, how much Dean wants him to leave, trying to understand what’s happening. Castiel cannot move his hand from the door; he is stuck until Dean speaks.

“Castiel.”

Dean hasn’t called Castiel by his full name in years. It’s jarring, and it stuns him into action. He swallows, and he makes the decision: to step out, or to enter. He closes the door behind him as he walks inside, the bell once again ringing brightly in the silence.

“Hello, Dean,” he finally says.

Suddenly Dean is moving towards him, and Castiel flinches back, causing Dean to stop. He opens his mouth, takes a breath, and then hesitates. “Cas,” he says. He looks for something--he looks at the floor--and then he notices Castiel’s lip and shirt. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s nothing. I...”

Dean clamps his jaw shut, and they look at each other, and it is painful. It rips Castiel’s heart straight through his chest; Dean knows now.

“You’re human?”

Castiel blinks; he nods. And just when he cannot take the tension any longer, he very suddenly finds himself completely and totally enveloped.

“Dean...”

“You stupid son of a bitch.” Dean’s voice is muffled somewhere in Castiel’s shoulder, and Castiel’s hands are hovering in the air around Dean’s back, unsure if they should settle, if he is allowed to hug Dean back--he wants to so badly. “You stupid, stupid, asshole!” Dean suddenly pulls away, gripping Castiel’s shoulders tightly and shaking him. “Where the hell have you been?”

There is a hand to Castiel’s cheek--brief, momentary, but warm and alight--catching his skin on fire and making his heart pound. He feels his eyes welling up and once again, for the thousandth time, he curses the fact that he is suddenly so human and so vulnerable.

“Dean,” He says, and then he swallows roughly. Dean doesn’t want an apology; he’s made that very clear in the past. But Castiel does not know what else to say. “Dean, I’m so sor--”

“Shut up, ok? Just--”

“Dean, please, I--I should have listened to you, I should have--”

“It’s over, ok?” Dean shakes him again. “It’s done. Whatever it is, it’s...” And a faint smile plays at the corners of his mouth, seemingly unsure if it belongs there. “Cas: you’re  _alright_.”

And then Castiel is being hugged again--his third time being hugged by Dean Winchester--and he feels himself finally able to respond. He lifts his arms, and he crosses them loosely over Dean’s back. He blinks in surprise when Dean responds, holding him closer, so he tightens his own grip, and they stay there like that for a very long time. Not long enough, by any means, and when Dean pulls away again, he is sniffing in a very suspect manner. “You’re an asshole. You know that, right?”

Castiel’s brows furrow and he smiles, looking at his shoes.

“Why the hell didn’t you contact me? Or Sam?”

“I--I wanted to, but I...”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Probably for some bullshit reason that would just make me pissed at you, right?”

Castiel opens his mouth, and then closes it again. “Probably.”

“Well, you’re an idiot.”

Castiel smiles softly and tilts his head. “Probably.”

Dean grins outright. “No, definitely.”

They look at each other for a long moment. Dean bites his lips, his fingers reaching out, leading his hands forward as if he can’t quite get enough of touching Castiel, wanting to nip at his wrists and shoulders and cheeks. He never quite closes the gap between them, but in those small actions volumes are said, and Castiel hears every word. He is forgiven. Dean has forgiven him, and Sam must have forgiven him; how on earth he can be forgiven again and again, he will never understand.

“We need to--” Dean clears his throat. “Your shirt. You want it cleaned?”

“Oh.” Castiel looks down at his chest. He sees the blood there and suddenly remembers the alley like it was a long time ago. The darkness there had been so overwhelming, and then suddenly, there was Dean. “Yes, I...” Castiel strips it away, flicking unsteadily at the buttons and handing it to Dean. “Thank you.”

Dean accepts it. Their fingers linger closely, clutching to the fabric, before he nods and walks away. “Need to get that busted lip looked at. You’ll be coming back to the bunker, of course. Don’t know why the hell you were anyplace else.”

Castiel watches him pour the stain-remover onto the collar, watches him rub the fabric together and separate it into the pile of lights he already has sorted. As though it belongs there. As though it were just another t-shirt in the Winchester pile of plaid and denim. When Dean looks up at his silence, Castiel nods and says very quietly, “I would be happy to.”

Castiel leans forward against a dryer, and Dean hops up onto one, crossing his legs and speaking, relating every moment that Castiel missed. They are close, and if their hands come to rest near each other’s or on each other’s, neither of them say a word about it. Castiel watches Dean speak, is grateful that Dean does not ask him many questions. For the first time, he suddenly feels how warm he can be in a human body. Whether he deserves Dean or not, somehow, for some reason, they ended up together after all.

It is moments like this, moments where Dean’s eyes are alight and his mouth is curving beautifully into another story, that Castiel thinks he suddenly believes in God again, that he believes in Fate. There is a power here, a power in simplicity. The simplicity of washing clothing, of listening to the rising hum and fall of washers and dryers. He looks at the pieces of his lost and found and he settles them together, sorting them deep into the soothing timbre of his dearest friend’s voice.


End file.
